A BOSTON GLOBE EDITORIAL

An island of peace

15 April, 2002

It has received scant attention on this side of the world, but there is another Oslo peace process, and that Norwegian-mediated peacemaking effort in Sri Lanka has recently fared much better than the Mideast peace plan negotiated eight years ago in Oslo.

More than 64,000 people have perished since 1983 in Sri Lanka's ethnic warfare. At the heart of the conflict are grievances held by the Tamils, who live mainly in the northeast of the island and comprise 18 percent of the country's population of 18.6 million. When the British quit Sri Lanka in 1948, they left the Tamils a well-educated minority holding prominent positions in politics and the professions. The Tamils' favored status resulted from an ethnic policy for colonial rule similar to policies pursued elsewhere by European colonialist powers.

The mainly Hindu Tamils' drive for some form of independence, or at least autonomy, originated with the postcolonial discrimination practiced by the Sinhalese Buddhist majority. Tamils and Sinhalese both have paid a terrible price because their leaders were unable to strike a sensible compromise.

So the election last December of Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, who campaigned on a peace platform, aroused hopes that Norway might finally be able to bring about negotiations between the government and the insurgents known as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. Matching deeds to words, Wickremesinghe accepted a cease-fire last December as soon as he took power.

In a welcome sign that the long nightmare of Sri Lanka's civil war could finally be nearing a political resolution, this past Wednesday the shadowy leader of the Tamil Tigers, Velupillai Prabhakaran, received 600 international journalists at a jungle camp in the northeast, where he praised the Sri Lankan prime minister ''for the bold action he has taken to promote'' the Norwegian peace initiative.

As the two sides prepare for peace talks next month in Thailand, the first such negotiations in seven years, both need to be encouraged and supported by the international community. For understandable reasons, the Sri Lankan government had previously lobbied Washington and other capitals to treat the Tigers strictly as a terrorist group. But the new prime minister has said he will end the domestic ban on the Tigers before the talks begin in Thailand. And at his long meeting with the press Wednesday, Prabhakaran hinted that he might abandon armed struggle and drop the longstanding Tiger demand for a separate Tamil state if the Tamils were granted autonomy, as in a confederal arrangement that preserved a unitary Sri Lankan state.